They Gather Flock-Wise,
Moving On The Level Currents That Roll About The Peaks, Lock Hands
And Settle With The Cooler Air, Drawing A Veil About Those Places
Where They Do Their Work.
If their meeting or parting takes place
at sunrise or sunset, as it often does, one gets the splendor of
the apocalypse.
There will be cloud pillars miles high,
snow-capped, glorified, and preserving an orderly perspective
before the unbarred door of the sun, or perhaps mere ghosts of
clouds that dance to some pied piper of an unfelt wind. But be it
day or night, once they have settled to their work, one sees from
the valley only the blank wall of their tents stretched along the
ranges. To get the real effect of a mountain storm you must be
inside.
One who goes often into a hill country learns not to say: What
if it should rain? It always does rain somewhere among the peaks:
the unusual thing is that one should escape it. You might suppose
that if you took any account of plant contrivances to save their
pollen powder against showers. Note how many there are
deep-throated and bell-flowered like the pentstemons, how many
have nodding pedicels as the columbine, how many grow in copse
shelters and grow there only. There is keen delight in the quick
showers of summer canons, with the added comfort, born of
experience, of knowing that no harm comes of a wetting at high
altitudes. The day is warm; a white cloud spies over the
canon wall, slips up behind the ridge to cross it by some windy
pass, obscures your sun.
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